Why an Email Marketing Agency Partner Will Give Your Brand a Competitive Edge
- Delivering personalization.
- Being disruptive.
- Breaking through the clutter.
- Being bold.
These are just a few of the hundreds of phrases buzzing through the heads of anyone tasked with marketing a modern-day brand.
Gone are the Mad Men-era days of poring manpower, resources and creativity into one impactful ad campaign that will drive awareness and revenue for months to come. Since those glory days, marketers have gradually had to embrace all new forms of communication that have emerged – television advertising, email communication, digital marketing, SEO, PPC, and social media, to name a few.
In fact, marketers today have hundreds of options to spread the word about their product or company. So, wherever does a driven marketing pro begin? What tactics should a brand bet on that will yield the best results?
One of the most effective forms of communicating with your audience is through a tactic that’s been around for decades – email marketing.
To this day, a consumer’s inbox is one of the best ways to build your brand, generate site traffic, produce leads and generate sales. This makes the inbox a sacred place. Once a brand has captured the trust of a consumer – enough for that person to allow them into their email space – it’s up to that brand to serve useful, relevant and valuable content on a regular basis.
In short, if you don’t have an email marketing strategy, it’s time to explore one ASAP. Once you begin, it’s essential to deliver a personalized experience, always improving and always exploring ways to be more sophisticated.
Before embarking on any email marketing initiative — whether it be establishing an email communication strategy and platform to finding opportunities for creative optimization – it’s essential to ask yourself this: do we have the expertise to conduct this in-house or do we need the help of an agency, one that has full service email marketing capabilities?
Answering this question proves to be difficult for many brands. While keeping the work in-house may seem appealing and budget friendly, many find they lack the time, resources or expertise to execute to the fullest potential. Many of our clients recognize the importance of email marketing to their brand; however, when they’ve tried to implement or execute it themselves, it requires a more knowledgeable team with greater resources and therefore is never truly optimized.
Here are just a few of the benefits of outsourcing your email marketing to an agency partner:
- They know exactly what works – and what doesn’t. One of the great benefits of working with a full-service marketing agency is they’ve worked with clients across industries. They’ve been privy to different campaigns and product launches, and they know what resonates with different audiences. Agency teams are a wealth of knowledge.
A marketing agency that knows email marketing will have great ideas on email strategy, creative, personalization, content, campaign analysis and overall ideas for optimization. Delivering creative copy ideas – everything from clever subject lines to compelling and attention-grabbing email content.
An agency team should also be able to share what won’t work, as well as ideas on how to differentiate from the competition. Expect a great agency partner to ask a lot of questions before providing email marketing recommendations.
- They’re meticulously on top of email compliance standards. This is a big one. Email compliancy must be taken seriously in today’s digital age.
Thanks to initiatives like CAN-SPAM Act of 2009, which set a wide range of rules for commercial email use, CASL anti-spam legislation from 2014, and GDPR regulations in 2018 for EU, brands must know exactly what they’re doing when communicating via email.
Regulations and best practices are constantly changing, sometimes as often as month to month. To not be well versed in these standards is to lose the trust of the people who follow you, not to mention penalties that can seriously damage or destroy your email strategy.
If you hire a full-service email marketing agency, the team will know the ins and outs of the latest compliancy standards so well that you won’t have to worry about harsh penalties. The best agencies will even know what changes are on the horizon and will adjust accordingly, so when privacy laws like GDPR go into practice, your brand will already have been practicing compliance.
When interviewing agencies, be sure to check the team’s knowledge on the latest compliancy standards, and understand how they keep abreast of what’s new and changing.
- They’re hip to all of the email marketing trends. As a marketer or a business owner overseeing various marketing campaigns, it can be difficult to stay on top of every trend. Furthermore, it can be difficult to differentiate between trend and fad.
A true agency partner will know the difference. They’ll be able to tell you what trends are emerging, why it’s emerging and what it means for your brand. The team should be able to give you compelling reasons why a new trend is worth embracing, and how it will affect your audience.
They’ll also be able to tell you what they believe is a fad – a flashy new marketing trend that everyone is talking about but won’t be here to stay for long. Your agency team will help you navigate through what’s new and what’s worthwhile. This way, you won’t be chasing down every new marketing gimmick as it relates to email marketing.
- They’ll help you see what you can’t see. It’s difficult to see the forest for the trees without the guidance and perspective of an agency partner. A big benefit of working with a full-service email marketing agency is they are typically very data driven and know how to interpret the numbers.
With a data-driven marketing team powering your brand’s email marketing, you will be able to see information like inbox penetration, IP reputation as well as basic deliverability, open rates and click-through rates. An agency partner should not only provide real-time reporting, but also bigger campaign analysis with key insights into how the content resonated with your audience and how the campaign drove real business results. This could be anything from results such as purchasing a product or a service over time to generating quality leads for the sales team.
An excellent agency can also advise on cleansing your contacts to ensure the highest level of accuracy, as well as building up your customer database with data enhancements. It’s important, when working with an agency, to communicate business goals and what you hope to achieve from every email marketing campaign.
At Reach Marketing, we blend the art of email marketing with data to create impressive results for our clients. As a full-service marketing agency, email marketing is part of our DNA as we handle every aspect of email communication for the brands we serve. This includes everything from building up a client’s database and cleansing the data to creating messaging, landing pages and tracking.
The result? We deliver your brand’s message at the right time to the right people. They then take action, and you enjoy the results.
One of the aspects that make Reach Marketing’s approach so effective is our multi-layered approach to email communication. In the pre-deployment phase, we work with clients to establish the email campaign, create text backup and assess the layout and design so it creates a significant impact on your audience. The ongoing phase ensures a client’s IP reputation score is monitored, sending domains are assessed, and ISPs have maintained clean distribution lines. Lastly, in the post-deployment phase, we provide live reporting, drive visitors into your CRM or to your designated internal reps, highlight noteworthy results, provide benchmark results, set up campaign triggers and deploy follow-up emails.
With each and every email sent, we work with clients to ensure we’re constantly learning, monitoring, assessing and understanding what the audience wants. We adjust, optimize and improve — all while delivering results and building upon previous successes.
Email marketing should be embraced as one of the most critical marketing tactics. Despite whatever marketing trend is buzzing, email marketing still moves the needle. It continues to be one of the most effective forms of marketing in our modern-day era with no signs of slowing down. It doesn’t matter the industry or the audience; consumers or business, it’s going to be an essential form of communication for years to come.
Are you ready to learn more about email marketing, or get a few ideas on how to make your existing efforts even more effective? We’d love to speak with you and share our expertise. For a free email creative evaluation, contact Reach Marketing at 855.867.3224 or click here to have an email expert contact you.
